Zeltus

Despite all the clever-clever Colour Studios and Colour pickers out there, I always have trouble deciding what colours to use in any particular theme. It never used to be this bad – Web-safe colours were the norm (all 216 of ‘em!) and before that, UNIX X11 windowing systems relied on a simple flat file called "rgb.txt" – which is still distributed with modern Linux distros today.

So I figured that if I looked for I would find a .css file of these X11 colours, ready for me to pick’n'choose some well-known favourites such as cadetblue or indianred. I am used to cut’n'pasting rather than using fancy IDEs, so although I do use Dreamweaver, I certainly don’t use all of it’s cleverer functions – one day maybe.

But a search failed to find any such file. It’s not surprising on reflection, as it really is of limited use – a .css file that size would simply slow the whole page load process down to a crawl – something Internet Explorer users already seem to find tolerable but us Firefox, Chrome, Opera and yes, Safari users certainly don’t.

Anyway, to cut a not-very-long story to a really-short story, I grabbed hold of a copy of an rgb.txt file and a few swift typically-arcane commands in vi, my favourite UNIX editor, I ended up with a humungous .css file containing all the X11 colours as simple class entries for both color: and background-color: properties.

And here it is…

As is ever the case, I did have some trouble with IE8 – it simply didn’t want to display the .css content the way I wanted to display it. So although the production of the file was a matter of minutes at most, I probably took over two hours to produce the page describing it! That’s the way the Microsoft biscuit crumbles I guess.

Anyway, I want to return to font handling now – the world has changed since my last post on this…

Technorati Tags: colours, css, rgb, rgb.txt, X11